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In Jonathan’s arms, Will has always felt the safest. Definitely safer than when he was with his dad, and maybe safer than when he is alone with his mom, too. While Will definitely feels safe with his mom, he also feels suffocated, sometimes.
Being alone with Jonathan never felt like that at all. Not even when his older brother would hold him so close, squished into one bed together during the nights when their parents were arguing and Jonathan had his arms around Will so tight around his head that he couldn’t hear anything beyond the sound of his own heartbeat.
This moment feels a lot like that right now. Jonathan’s arms around him the tightest, Lucas’ next, and Dustin, and El, and…
… and Mike, of course.
Mike, who Will couldn’t even look at for longer than he needed to when he was speaking. Mike, who he couldn’t avoid looking at either, lest it be suspicious. But he couldn’t help it when the name Tammy had slipped out of his mouth. Instinctively, his eyes had found Mike’s face: curly hair covered under a beanie, a scar settling into the skin on the right side of his face, and his eyes unreadable as they watched him.
It looked like Mike is hanging onto every word he’s saying. But Will doesn't know for sure, because he couldn’t stomach looking at Mike for more than two seconds at a time. He could barely stomach the conversation, it had been on a whim, a stroke of bravery, a moment wherein he wanted to be like Robin and tell someone the truth.
Or someones. He hadn’t really meant for that to happen, but everyone was here, and he would’ve been fine just telling his mom, but who knows if he would’ve gotten the courage to do this again. Maybe it was cowardly to tell everyone at once: but it couldn’t have been too bad, since right after, Will felt more fearless than he has in a long time. Possibly ever.
When the hug loosens and breaks apart after what could be eons — but really couldn’t even have been a minute — the first face Will sees is Jonathan’s. He kisses Will’s cheek and then says so quietly, so that only Will can hear, “I love you, Will.”
“Love you, too,” Will whispers. His voice is hoarse and thick and watery, and he’s kind of glad that no one besides Jonathan heard him. Even though there really isn’t anything — not anymore — that Will could do to embarrass or disgrace himself beyond what transpired in the past ten minutes.
“Ready for battle?” Hopper asks. He’s not addressing Will specifically, but he locks eyes with him and nods in what Will can only conclude to be a parental sign of approval. Not that he has much experience with what it’s like coming from a father figure, but that’s neither here nor there, because Bob actually did quite like him a bit—
But now Will is getting off topic. The important thing is that he actually does steel himself for battle. This plan, Steve Harrington’s insane plan (which in of itself is an insane collection of words), requires everyone to be right on the money. No risks, not this time. Not after Max. Not anymore.
Which is why when Will makes eye contact with Mike, he lets himself stare for more than two seconds. Just this once. He is going to miss looking at Mike’s eyes. They’ve always been so warm and full of everything he’s feeling, even if a lot of that had faded over the past two years. Will can see some of it now, and even just that is enough.
After going two years without being best friends with your best friend, the smallest of things feel like the biggest of things. Maybe that’s why Mike became his Tammy, but even so, a small part of Will acknowledges that there is more to that than him and Mike drifting apart. That there’s more to how his heart beat for Mike beyond a crush. Mike only likes girls, and Will doesn’t like girls: Mike started touching Will again when his connection to the hive mind started acting up again, and Will hasn’t been able to stand the sound of Mike jumping to his defense now that he’s become their Sorcerer.
Mike the Brave. Will the Wise.
Everyone splits up, preparing to head back to the MAC-Z. Will thought he’d hate going back there more than he actually does, given that it was his first time actually seeing Vecna’s physical form — not a Demogorgon, not the particles of the Mind Flayer, but Vecna’s veiny, noseless, physical form standing on two legs. The most human-looking version of everything that’s been haunting him for the past handful of years.
Will is glad that he’d been able to see him, even just once, even if it sounds psychotic to admit. But it had been cathartic, in some way, to see that it had not actually all been in his head. There is a person behind it all, even if Henry Creel is the most psychopathic, disturbed, distorted version of a human that there is. He’s real, and he’s a human, and that means he can die. He will die. El and everyone else is making sure of it. He will make sure of it — or do as much of his part to make sure of it as he can.
What happened to Max can never happen again. And even if it’s the last thing Will will do, he is going to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Not the not-actually-a-coma, not the insistent loop of Kate Bush that Lucas had played for her every single day for eighteen months, and definitely no more spying. No more tunnels. No to all of it.
If Venca uses Will’s eyes to see everything, then Will will just have to make sure that his eyes can’t be useful going into this final battle into the Abyss. Never again.
There are only ten minutes before they’re supposed to load up in Murray’s truck. Mike’s made his bomb, Nancy and Jonathan have loaded their guns, and Steve and Dustin are somewhere where Will can’t see them, hopefully getting their nonsense sorted. They’re literally about to walk into the apocalypse, and the last thing either of them need in their minds is the rift in their friendship: Will hopes they figure it out.
Meanwhile, he’s managed to escape the watchful eye of his mother for a little while. He’s in the room he’d been sleeping in earlier in the day while in his trance. Will avoids the bed just so that he doesn’t have to think about what happened while he was unconscious, but it’s a futile attempt that doesn’t end in much anyways.
He thought he’d have more time alone, steeling himself for what’s to come, acknowledging the weight in his pocket, but the door creaking open causes him to whip his head towards that direction.
Mike walks in. Notably, alone. And even more notably, closing the door behind him.
Only for a moment, Will allows his breath to catch. He’s always found Mike Wheeler to be cute, but in the past two years, he’s grown a bit more past his baby fat and into his features, and he’s a lot more handsome now. Enough to the point that Will finds it hard to take a breath in, sometimes, when he lets himself stare for too long.
He really will miss looking at Mike — which is why he takes the liberty of looking right now. The stretch of his long torso, the length of his lanky limbs. The dip of his cupid’s bow. The curve of his nose. The dark eyes that watch him silently as he stalks deeper into the room, closer to where Will hasn’t moved even an inch.
There’s two feet of space between them when Mike comes to a stop. Maybe three. Will isn’t sure because he doesn’t look down to check.
If he has his eyes for only a handful of minutes longer, he wants to use them to look at Michael Wheeler, and all his teenage, greasy glory — he’s had better days. They all have. They all will, once this nightmare is over.
“Milk Duds and extra butter, huh?” Mike says, a smile stretching across the shape of his perfect mouth. Will has let himself look at Mike’s mouth a lot more since he and El broke up twelve months ago. “Could really go for that right now.”
“Is that all you got from that?” Will teases, mainly because it’s what he knows how to do best. When it comes to Mike, laughing together has always been easier than harbouring one-sided feelings for him. Mike only likes girls, and Will doesn’t like girls. At least they can both like Milk Duds in their extra-buttery popcorn.
“What, you mean you weren’t just announcing all your favourite things to everyone?” Mike asks. He takes it back immediately though, and this time when he speaks, there isn’t a single trace of a smile on his mouth. “No, that was a hell of a speech you gave, out there,” he says quietly.
“Yeah,” Will whispers. And then he clears his throat, because if he doesn't, then he’s going to start crying again. And it’s not like he’s thirteen anymore wherein Mike will wipe his tears away because he’s scared. He’s not too sure what Mike would do if they were alone and Will started crying, and he’s not too keen to find out. Even if that means never finding out. “Even though I did mention one thing that I didn’t like.”
“Girls,” Mike blurts out immediately. As if it didn’t take Will his entire life up until this point to say the very same thing. Mike always has, as it is, been the braver one between the two of them. “Will, I—you didn’t have to tell anyone that.”
Will, an expert when it comes to reading Mike, can’t really identify what tone Mike is using when he says this. It’s the voice he’d been using a lot in the past two years, and maybe that’s why it’s so unfamiliar despite being familiar. Will has lived with the Wheelers all this time, yet Mike has never felt so far away and simultaneously close.
“I did,” Will counters defensively. He feels his shoulders rise and he takes a step back. He knows that Mike said, inadvertently, that Will wouldn’t lose him, but now he’s not in front of Jonathan and Joyce. And it’s not like Will thinks that Mike is going to hate him down to his bones now, but the truth of the matter is that Will doesn't know the Mike standing in front of him the way he knows the Mike in his memories. “Henry—Vecna, he’s in my head, Mike. That’s what he does, he gets into your head and he—he sees everything. The present time and memories and secrets and things you don’t want him to see. The stuff that you don’t want anyone to see, and then he uses all those dark things to show you futures that don’t exist yet but that aren’t impossible, either.”
This isn’t new information to Mike. At least, it shouldn’t be, not after Vecna had gotten into Max’s mind and Nancy’s mind.
“He can’t have anything over me,” Will continues when Mike stays silent. He didn’t really think he’d have much to say, anyways. “And now he won’t because I just told everyone out there my biggest secret and—” Will swallows, finding the next words hard to push out of his throat, “—they’re all still here.” You’re still here, goes unsaid.
Mike continues to stay silent for a moment more. Will can’t conclude the look in his eyes, but for a brief moment, he sees a flicker of hesitation. Will sees the moment wherein Mike lets whatever bullshit facade he’d been wearing for the past eighteen months slip, the same way it had slipped more times than Will can count. He’d been too cowardly to talk to Mike about it, and figured that if Mike couldn’t even handle high-fiving him, then he certainly couldn’t handle a conversation like this.
Nonetheless, they find themselves here anyway. Minutes away from driving into the Upside Down again, facing the unknown.
“Will,” Mike says his name. He’s using a soft voice, one that Will recalls from when things were simpler and they thought that everything had ended with expelling the Mind Flayer particles out of him. How foolish were they, back then… “You’ll never be different, okay?”
“I am different, Mike,” was he not listening to Will out there? “The whole point is that I’m different. And I’m—I’m okay with that.” Or at least, it’s become easier to make his peace with that. He won’t wake up one day and not be different, no matter how he used to pray for a day like that to come. Will knows now that there are maybe worse things lurking in this world than liking boys.
“But you’re not different,” Mike insists. “You’ll never be different to me. You’re just… Will. The same person you always have been. You’re my person, Will, and nothing is ever going to change that. Nothing can change that.”
It’s a sweet sentiment. Unlike a bunch of their previous conversations, Will can hear the emotion in Mike’s voice as he speaks. He can tell that he means it. He can see that his eyes are molten with it. He can see that he has something more to say. It’s a lot more than he’s seen in the past two years.
So, Will has no choice but to believe him.
(And maybe his kryptonite is how, at the end of it all, Will will always find a way to believe Mike.
Because friends don’t lie.)
“If you really think that…” Will begins, grateful that the stroke of bravery from before is still brewing inside him. He wouldn’t have had the courage to ask otherwise, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel a bit reckless fresh off the feeling of being smothered in tens of hugs. “… then I need you to help me with something.”
“Anything,” Mike immediately agrees. “Anything you need, Will, I—”
“You don’t even know what it is,” Will snorts. “And when you do find out, you’re going to try and talk me out of it.”
This, at least, makes Mike falter a bit. The eagerness on his face dissipates a bit, and before he can ask a question or steer this into a direction it doesn't need to go in, Will begins speaking.
“When Vecna used me to spy on Max, my eyes—”
“—were bleeding,” Mike finishes, nodding his head as he shares the information that, apparently, is not new news to him. “Eleven, she—El told us. On the way to the hospital. Are they—” He reaches out, one hand outstretched and hovering mere inches away from Will’s face, like Mike doesn’t know what to do with his fingers now that they’re actually within touching distance of his face. “Are they okay?”
“I can see just fine, if that’s what you’re asking,” Will says. “But that’s exactly the problem, Mike. I can see, which means that whenever Vecna wants—”
“—he can also see,” Mike finishes. He’s always been good at reading Will like this, even though it’s been lost somewhere in the past eighteen months. And then, it seems to dawn on him where Will’s line of thinking is taking him. His eyes get wide and frantic, and he takes a step closer while scanning all over Will’s face. Paler than usual, Mike says, “Will, you can’t—”
“I told you you’d try to talk me out of it,” Will points out.
“Yeah, because this is insane,” Mike says, louder than anything else he’s said so far. The walls are thin — Will is sure that if they’re any louder, the others will be clued into their conversation. And it’s not like Will was planning on keeping this a secret, but it would be great if as little people as possible would make a commotion over it. “This all ends tonight, Will, you don’t need to do any of this.”
“How can we be so sure it ends tonight?” Will immediately asks back, voicing a concern he’s had ever since hearing Lucas’ theory. It’s not that he doubts his friend, it’s that Vecna is unpredictable. All twelve of those kids, as malleable and easy as Henry had described them, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re also unpredictable. That both Holly and Derek actually know the truth. “And if he knows that we’re there? If he knows we’re in the Upside Down, and he knows that we’re heading to the Abyss, and he knows that Max is safe, that El is here, that Kali is alive—”
“Then we kill that bastard before he can make any sense of any of this! Hell, we barely just made sense of any of it!” Mike exclaims. His eyes are still wide and his cheeks are splotchy with emotion as he realizes that Will is not kidding. Of course he isn’t — why would he be? “Will, El is strong, and she has Kali, and we have you. Our Sorcerer, Will, and Vecna? He doesn’t stand a chance. Not with Holly fighting in there, too. Not when Max knows the way around his mind. Not even with this freak of a plan that Steve Harrington somehow came up with.”
Will wishes, he really does, that he could be as optimistic as Mike. But Will has lived most of his life in paranoia, and this is just another instance of that. Max was never supposed to be gone for so long, if Jason hadn’t broken her Walkman. Holly was never supposed to be taken, if Will hadn’t been rescued all those years ago. Whether it be the guilt of escaping, the guilt of making those underground tunnels, the guilt of showing him where Max laid in the hospital — Will was never supposed to let it get this far, no matter if he’d been chosen as the vessel.
He’s choosing right now, right here, that he’s done being the vessel. For once, he’s going to make a choice in this puppet-relationship he has with Henry.
“It ends tonight, Mike,” Will agrees, “and me being his vessel ends now. He’ll never use me again. He’ll never be inside me again, and he’ll—” Will swallows past the lump in his throat, “—he’ll never make me hurt any of you ever again.”
“Will,” Mike whispers. He doesn’t sound defeated, but he does sound like he wants to painstakingly consider every other option besides this one. But time is not a luxury that they have anymore. Maybe, they haven’t had the luxury of time for years. “You’ll never see again,” he says thickly. Like it was hard for him to say. Like he doesn’t like the version of reality wherein he can’t see Will’s eyes anymore. Maybe that’s what it is: the molten, honest look from earlier is still in Mike’s eyes, even if Will can no longer make much sense of it.
The hand that had been previously hovering awkwardly by Will’s face finally touches him. It’s skin-on-skin contact that’s felt more purposeful and intentional than it has in a long time. Will resists the urge to lean into it, even when Mike’s thumb strokes under his eye.
“I’ve seen a lot in my life,” Will jokes. Maybe it’s not the right thing to say at this moment, since the corners of Mike’s mouth get pulled down into a frown, and the grip of his hand gets firmer.
“You’ll never see Joyce again. Or Jonathan, or Dustin, Lucas, El, Max, me—”
“I’ve seen enough of Mike Wheeler to last me a lifetime,” Will snorts before he can help it.
“Will,” again, not the right thing to say, based on Mike’s tone. Clearly, humour isn’t landing right now… “These are your eyes—”
“Barely,” Will interrupts. He sounds way more nonchalant than he feels. Honestly, this decision had been easier to make than having everyone sit down so he could tell them just how different he is from the rest of them. He doesn’t know why. Maybe because it feels very final. Maybe because this is the one thing he can do to sever the connection between him and Vecna once and for all. Finally, something he can do himself to feel normal. To feel clean. To finally feel like William Byers, again. “Eye of Vecna, remember?”
“This isn’t D&D, Will—” Mike’s voice sounds strangled. His thumb is pressing harder into the skin below Will’s eye. Will brings a hand to Mike’s wrist to remind him that he is, in fact, still here right in front of him.
“This whole thing has been D&D, Mike. Since the way I went missing and El flipped that gameboard over. Since you started calling those things Demogorgons and Vecna and the Abyss and—”
“Okay, I get it,” Mike breathes out, “but—”
“I don’t want you to talk me out of it,” Will says firmly.
Another strangled sound from Mike’s throat. “Then what exactly do you want from me?”
“I want you to do what you do best,” Will tells him, honestly, genuinely, more honest than he’s been with Mike in a very, very long time. He thinks about the painting he gave Mike last spring, and he thinks about the eighteen months they spent living together, and he thinks about calling him Tammy not even twenty minutes ago — and he thinks about how when this is all over, maybe they’ll have all the time in the world to talk about everything Will has been dishonest about.
And hopefully they can talk about everything Mike has been dishonest about too, because the look in Mike’s eyes reminds Will of what he saw when they were younger, and he wants to know where that Mike had gone in the past couple years. Alongside why he still hasn’t removed his hand from Will’s face. And maybe he’ll even ask what all the protectiveness in the past two days has been about.
There’s a lot, Will is realizing, that he and Mike need to talk about. But for now, he reaches into his pocket, and watches how Mike’s eyes briefly track that movement.
“What do I do best?” Mike asks, his voice a whisper, as if he’s afraid of the answer. Maybe he’s right to be afraid, even though Will isn’t. Will can understand him, especially as he places a knife into Mike’s trembling, unoccupied hand. His skin is cold and clammy. Will stares extra hard at it, for one final time.
“You’re brave. And right now, I need Mike the Brave.”
Defeated, Mike slumps forward. Their foreheads touch, and Will sees the way Mike closes his eyes. His fingers curl around Will’s own, the cool metal of the knife held between their palms.
“You’re crazy,” Mike whispers. His voice sounds choked, but at least his eyes open again. “You are fucking crazy.” But Will can see Mike steel himself. He can feel the way Mike’s fingers tighten around the knife. He can see, clear as day, that this was never about denying Will what he asked for — this was about finding a way to do this in literally any other way.
But this is Vecna they’re dealing with. This is everything supernatural that they didn’t know about the world.
“Someone once told me that if I was going crazy, then he’d go crazy with me,” Will reminds Mike, just in case he chickened out of this at the last moment (not that Will actually thinks he would. You know, Mike the Brave, and all that…)
“What a fucking moron, that guy,” Mike breathes out. Their foreheads are still touching, so Will can see the liquid pooling in Mike’s eyes. He hasn’t seen Mike cry since he was thirteen years-old. Right now, sixteen year old Mike Wheeler’s voice cracks as he speaks his name. “Will…”
“C’mon, Mike,” Will encourages, smiling for the both of them. “Can’t we go crazy together?”
Mike scoffs. It kind of sounds like a laugh. It also kind of sounds wet. Mike also sniffles.
“Crazy together,” he agrees.
A Paladin, resigned to a fate decided by his Sorcerer.